The government may have stopped Al-Jazeera from broadcasting last week's Judges' Club meeting, but detaining eight of the channels' employees did not get it much good press, reports Mustafa El-Menshawy Egyptian police briefly detained eight Al- Jazeera satellite channel employees on Friday for attempting to broadcast a much-publicised meeting of the Cairo Judges' Club. The controversial, Qatar-based, pan-Arab satellite channel was aiming to provide its viewers with a live telecast of the judges' general assembly, which ultimately decided to boycott the upcoming multi-candidate presidential elections unless judges were given full supervisory control over the elections process. The arrests of the Al-Jazeera camera crew resulted in an outcry amongst the Egyptian media community, as well as in international media watchdog circles, which said the incident was especially disturbing in light of other recent crackdowns on journalists, and despite frequent governmental rhetoric touting reform. According to Al-Jazeera correspondent Samir Omar, one of those who were detained, when the crew arrived at the Judges' Club to set up for the live transmission of the four- hour meeting, they were asked by police to leave the building, based on claims that their cameras were booby-trapped. "As we left, policemen forced us into taxis," then escorted them to a downtown State Security office. Omar said they were detained for nearly seven hours, long enough to prevent them from covering the key event. According to Omar and other eyewitnesses, Al-Jazeera's Cairo bureau chief, Hussein Abdel-Ghani, was also pushed three times by police while trying to intervene. Abdel- Ghani, who was not detained, said he spent the next three hours contacting Information Minister Anas El-Fiqi and senior Interior Ministry officials in a fruitless attempt to secure the crew's release. Al-Jazeera did not announce or run news about the detentions until after those contacts took place, Abdel- Ghani said. An Interior Ministry spokesman said Al- Jazeera did not have the proper permits to cover the judges' meeting. Station officials dismissed the claim, arguing that the channel is already registered with the State Information Service (SIS) press office, which regulates foreign media activities in Egypt. Even though official SIS press office regulations do stipulate that separate permits be obtained before covering every event in Egypt, an SIS source said that over the past two years, not a single reporter has actually been required to obtain that kind of separate permit. She said the permit involves obtaining permissions from several state and military security bodies -- "a ridiculous process" that the source said could take 10 days to complete. After news of the detentions was broadcast on Al-Jazeera, which boasts some 40 million viewers worldwide, reactions from journalists as well as local and international human rights organisations began to pour in. Amongst them was concern from the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), whose executive director Ann Cooper said, in a statement sent to Al-Ahram Weekly, that the CPJ was "deeply troubled by these detentions. Detaining journalists does not square with the Egyptian government's proclamations about political reform". Local outrage was strong as well, mainly in light of the fact that several journalists were also briefly rounded up by police while covering anti-Mubarak demonstrations staged by Kifaya just a few weeks ago. "If the government thinks it was successful because it prevented Al-Jazeera from transmitting the event live, it needs to think again," said Yehya Qallash of the Journalists' Syndicate council. "The move was counterproductive by all accounts." The Egyptian Organisation for Human Rights (EOHR) also condemned the detentions; its secretary-general, Hafez Abu Seada, said the move would easily fortify sceptics of government claims regarding reform. Abu Seada, a lawyer, also dismissed the permit violation as ridiculous. "How can a democratic country ask reporters for a permit every time they cover a story or a meeting?" Al-Jazeera, nonetheless, appeared keen to avoid a major clash with the Egyptian government over the incident, choosing not to overemphasise it on their broadcasts. Instead, the Cairo bureau appeared to take its own sort of revenge by raising the volume on its coverage of the judges' refusal to monitor elections. Observers said the detentions might have been linked to government anger over Al- Jazeera's widespread coverage of Egyptian opposition activity, including extensive hosting of guests from the outlawed but sometimes tolerated Muslim Brotherhood. The rocky relationship between the channel and the government was clear at Al-Jazeera's downtown office, where uniformed and plainclothes policemen were standing outside. Inside the office, two members of the Muslim Brotherhood were providing one of the channel's producers with videotapes showing a solidarity meeting pushing for the release of four university lecturers detained in the Delta city of Mansoura over calls for reform. "Al- Jazeera is much more trustworthy and professional than state-run TV," said one of the two men, speaking on condition of anonymity. The judges who visited the channel's office to be interviewed live on the air after the channel was banned from covering the judicial meeting, appeared to reflect a similar attitude. Many were just as furious about the government's restricting their access to the media as they were about the elections supervision issue itself.
